Sixty-nine per cent of Labour supporters would want a top rate tax of 50 per cent even if it brought in no money.

That is, they would impose the tax simply to punish people for having created wealth – on moral grounds. Theft motivated purely by maliciousness is regarded as moral by these people.

No doubt they would wrap their malice in rhetoric about reducing income inequality…

The case against state-enforced equality is not that a narrowing of the wealth gap is in itself a bad thing; it’s that it carries a disproportionate cost in terms of lost prosperity and lost freedom.

Wealth taxes make societies more equal; but they do so by making them less prosperous. We can push plutocrats into shifting their money abroad. We can drive hedgies to Singapore or Switzerland. We can, more prosaically, make entrepreneurs spend more time with their accountants and less creating jobs. We can encourage by far the most common forms of legal tax avoidance: shorter hours and earlier retirement. All these things will make our country more equal. All of them will make it poorer.

Lately Obama has been demagoguing the income inequality issue like a true Marxist. Appallingly but unsurprisingly, he has revealed that he believes wealth should be confiscated even if it actually reduces government revenue, “for purposes of fairness.”

Fairness as used by leftists like Obama is an Orwellian term roughly synonymous with “unfairness” that can be translated as “senseless economic vandalism.” This term describes most left-wing economic policy.